As summer approaches, high school students face their biggest challenge at this time: getting a job. Jobs ranging from service industry to research labs are common occupations for adolescents leading to themselves the planning and development of entering the workforce.
“This summer and all year long I’ve been working at Kumon,” junior Sreyansi Dash said. “It’s a tutoring center for little kids and my job is basically a floater. I cut folders, I answer their questions and I grade their work.”
Sometimes working can bring different benefits such as gaining access to fellowship through interning. Even as a new entree into the workforce, they gain new life experiences and skills.
“Having the [business research] internship is really special,” junior Sanskriti Honnihal said. “I feel like in the sense that I get a lot more experience than I really thought I would have and my mentors are really nice people, so they give me that leeway when I have also scored.”
However, the workforce can get stressful yet rewarding as it increases connections and relationships in the community as junior Jenny Nyguen can relate to when working as a barista and receptionist at a nail salon.
“It gets very overwhelming especially because I work on the weekends, so I experienced the rush,” Nguyen said. “However it is pretty fun to communicate with people that really makes it better and more bearable, but I definitely wanted to quit a lot of time.”
The reasoning behind obtaining a job varies from goals and their objective lives whether it is due to economic conditions or gaining future expertise.
“This internship was primarily to get experience in the field I was paying to work in and it was a really good stepping stone into real life in how the workforce would be, and how I could handle that stress so then later on I could build my skills,” Honnihal said.
Through their occupations, students develop their own ability to guide the future as they can align their future interests with jobs.
“I want to work with kids in the future as a pediatrician and working with kids just gives me more experience and I have a younger brother so it helps a lot more but I know how little kids think and what they do,” Dash said.
The workforce industry offers students a break from their dominant settings, school and home, and it is an opening to expand their world that stimulates them in comparison to other jobs.
“I found that it was a job so my past experiences with work, especially with balancing school, that it was relaxing to go to my job because it’s a different environment from being at school,” Nguyen said.
As students continue to apply to jobs, it is important to be cautious of how the workforce industry actually works and functions, and the way presents themselves to employers from the initial point.
“One piece of advice for students looking for jobs is to be patient and to really build your resume correctly carefully because a lot of people really think that it is full of adjectives to describe yourself in this stuff, but it’s really good to keep it simple,” Nguyen said. “It’s also good to be patient because if one job does not reply to you that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.”
